The Site
I have long been fascinated by the Pacific Theater of WWII and, more precisely, with the Japanese Navy and Air Forces. Their mindset regarding the design of the equipment they would take into war is unique: they built many types of ships to either outclass their contemporaries, or to meet very specific needs; and in the process they flaunted naval norms. Indeed, by 1941, the Japanese Navy was the third largest in the world and the largest in the Pacific and Indian oceans: No small feat for a country that had industrialized less than 50 years before. This site is dedicated to the ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) that plied the waters between 1941 and 1945.
Plastic Models and the IJN
As a die-hard hobbyist, I have been building ships, aircraft and tanks from the second world war for decades. I find the process of constructing, painting and displaying to be relaxing (mostly) and they provide me with a sense of accomplishment, no matter how small. The secondary purpose of my model building is to provide me with scale references of the actual equipment they depict. Ever wanted to see how the HMS Dreadnought would have looked next to the battleship Yamato? Build the two of them and then marvel at the extraordinary advances in technology that took place between the 35 years of their respective commissioning. Model building provides the amateur historian in me with three dimensional and tangible references.
Enjoy the site!